Bloodmoney

21

Dr. Omar returned home to South Waziristan on the second anniversary of the day when hell came to earth. He told no one. People said it was too dangerous in the tribal areas now, and few of his university friends even knew that he was a refugee from that world. But memories of the place haunted him, especially of that last afternoon. When he closed his eyes, he saw the metallic gleam in the sky ten thousand feet above; he saw the flash-click, like the pop of a flashbulb and the opening and closing of a camera shutter-that transformed life into death; he watched as his family vanished in a pulse of light. Sometimes it was all he saw.

He had dreamed of leaving this place forever. His exile had begun when his father sent him away to school in Razmak, up the road in North Waziristan. When he left, Omar had only the tendrils of beard. But even then he wanted a life that would not be bounded by the primitive triad of zar zam zamin -gold, women and land. He was the bright boy who excelled in mathematics, the one destined for college and engineering school. Omar had embodied the possibility of escape. But he had come to understand that this was an illusion. There is no escape from the tribal code that defines who you are.

People called him Dr. Omar, or “professor,” and religious friends used the Islamic honorific ustad, or “learned one.” The handful who knew he was from the Tribal Areas spoke of him as the hope for progress and reconciliation. His black hair was trimmed by a barber; he shaved his face every morning with an electric razor; he dressed like a college professor, in a sports jacket and open-necked shirt. His hands were soft, too. He did not believe in violence as a way of life; for him the code of revenge was learned and, in that sense, unnatural. That was why he needed to go home: to remember and recommit.

Dr. Omar told friends in Islamabad that he was going away for a bit of holiday up in the mountains. People thought he meant Gilgit or Chitral, in the far north. He borrowed a friend’s Toyota and headed southwest toward Bannu, where he stopped at the ISI office to get the necessary papers and permissions. He showed them his identity card, which listed his birthplace. He was visiting home, he said: Peace was coming to his native region, thanks to the ISI, and he wanted to see the place again and tell people about the new world that was waiting outside these barren hills.

The road west into the mountains was treacherous, better traveled by animals than cars. Omar took his time; he wanted to see every tree and hillside. Driving down the dusty road from Razmak toward Makeen, he went so slowly that the other cars honked and raced past him, calling out names. He didn’t care. The distant landscape hadn’t changed: the low hills rising from the narrow valley, dotted with pines and scrub brush, and beyond, the slate-gray hillsides of the dry mountains. And everywhere the rocks, as if God had made this land his slag heap for the pieces that wouldn’t fit anywhere else.

As he got closer to home, Omar began to see the scars of the war. The big compound in Makeen where the young fighters had done their training was shattered by bombs. He stopped the car and got out to look: He saw corrugated metal from what had once been a roof; and the collapsed walls, chunks of concrete pierced by steel reinforcing bars. These were the big targets that had been hit by the Pakistani air force; they were the visible wounds. There were new stores in the market center; bright signs that advertised cellular telephone carriers and Japanese automobile tires and laundry powder from Lahore; there was even a new red sign that read, coca-cola.

Omar turned off the main road toward his family’s compound a few miles distant from Makeen center. The road sloped up now, winding with the curve of a dry riverbed that was strewn with rocks on this summer day. He remembered this river in springtime when it was engorged by the runoff of the melting snows from the mountains to the west, near the Afghan border. On a sunny day, he would come here with his younger brother Karimullah, rolling an inner tube that they would ride through the surging waters, clinging for dear life. Looking at the dry bed now, you could not imagine that water had ever flowed through it.

The road curved away from the stream and he saw a row of apple trees. This was the southern edge of his family’s property. Once this orchard had been neatly tended; his father had sent him out with a scythe to cut down the low brush; now it was overgrown with weeds and scrub. A few early apples that had fallen from the trees were rotting on the ground, infested with worms.

He had in his mind a picture of what he saw as a boy when he returned from the orchard with a basket of apples on his shoulders. He would take the path toward home, this one just ahead, and he would see the family compound snug against the hills. The walls would change color with the light of the day: red-hot in the summer sun, dappled on a cloudy day. When he banged at the gate and the servant boy opened the heavy wooden barrier, he would enter a special place in which food was always cooking, and people were laughing, and there was always a cool spot to rest in summertime and a warm one in winter.

Omar rounded this last curve and looked: There was nothing at all. Even the rubble had been stripped. You could see where the walls of the compound had been and bits of debris that were useless even to the scavengers. There was nobody to live here, and nobody even to rebuild it.

He closed his eyes and tried again to imagine the way it had been, but this time the image would not come. It was gone, with his family. The pieces of their flesh had decomposed into this ground. He bent down and kissed the earth. The dust caked his lips, but he kissed the ground again and wept. For a long time, he could not stand up. There was no power in his legs, because of the sadness and the emptiness of loss. What gives us the strength to move? It is anger.

Across the vale he saw the home of his cousin Najib. The compound was still standing. He walked the half mile to the gate and knocked on it until a gnarled man emerged, his beard gray, his faced creased by sun and suffering. It could not be that this wizened man was his cousin; they were nearly the same age. His eyesight had gone, and he did not recognize Omar. He welcomed the stranger in the Pashtun way, invited him into the courtyard, sat him down with a drink. He had a satellite television, powered by his generator, and he turned on the picture, to be polite, while they talked.

Cousin Najib wanted to know who this visitor might be. The professor explained that his relatives had lived in Makeen long ago but moved away. They lived in Quetta now; that was where most of the refugees had moved during the decades of war. The visitor named a family who lived a mile or so away, and said they were his people. He asked about neighbors who had been friends of his father and brothers.

What about Hakimullah from across the valley? Dead, with all his family. And Majid, what about him? He was dead, too. His wife had survived but she had moved away after the drones attacked. She lived in Peshawar now, or maybe Bannu. And Ahmed Wali? He survived the drones, but he was killed in the mountains. His boys swore revenge, but they were dead now, too. This was a land of ghosts, said the host. The people were all gone; the ones like him who pretended to live, they were ghosts, too.

Cousin Najib put on his glasses. He studied the face of his visitor-short-haired, beardless, his face seemingly unmarked by this harsh world.

“I know you,” said the bearded man. “You are Omar. We played together when we were boys. Your brothers were Karimullah and Nazir. Your father was Haji Mohammed. I know you.”

“You are mistaken,” answered the visitor. “Omar is dead. He died with his family in the drone attack. I am another.”

When he returned to Islamabad, the professor went to the head of his department and asked for a few weeks’ leave. He said that he had a promising research project on which he needed to concentrate. He didn’t trust the security of the computers at the university, so he bought a new one, into which he could plug his flash drive and parse the names and numbers that he had assembled so painstakingly. It was a jigsaw puzzle of vengeance. You had to fit the pieces together just so, and then you glimpsed the pattern and the picture was revealed.

In the culture from which Dr. Omar had emerged, there were rules as precise in their way as the symbolic logic of computers. There was itbar, which meant trust, and was the bond between equal men and the foundation of dignified life. There was nang, which was honor, and badal, which was the personal code that required that a blow to that honor to be answered by an equal blow, bloodshed by bloodshed. Without this reciprocal balance, the world would have no order and life would be meaningless.

A special obligation for revenge was applied in the case of meerata, which was the annihilation of the male members of a family. In such cases, the tribe would set the houses of the culprits afire and drive them from the country and kill them, one by one, until the score was settled. The tor, the black of shame, could only be converted to spin, or white, by death. The cycle was one of purification, and it would end with the peace known as melmastia, the generous spirit in which the just man was able to forgive the wrong done to him. But not until the balance of honor had been restored.

The professor knew very well who had killed his family and ravaged the other clans that made up his world. It was the Central Intelligence Agency. They had devised this means of assassination from the sky; they did it in secret, so they claimed, though they boasted about it all the while. The worst of it was that they took these actions from the safety and security of great distance. They were cowardly: They never looked their victims in the eye; they never heard the screams. This was inhuman, the professor thought; it required a calculated response.

And so the professor had pondered how he might make these assassins feel the same fear that the people of his valley had felt for all these years. He was not at war with the world. He was a Muslim, but he was not passionate about his faith. He did not want to be like the jihadists who boasted of their violent deeds in videos and on the Internet. They were no better than the Americans; they thought they were God’s chosen ones. They talked about the virgin girls who awaited them in heaven, how they would be “rocketed to paradise.” When they looked at pornography, they said they were getting ready for the joys of martyrdom. The professor might use these jihadists because he had no choice, but he did not admire them. They did not understand the balance of honor, the gundi, which makes civilized life possible even in the terrible wilderness of the Tribal Areas.

The professor had begun his work, but it was not finished. He understood that when he kissed the ground on which his family had died. There was more saz, more blood money, still to be paid. He knew that it would have to end someday, just as it had started, but he didn’t know how. When was the saz enough? He wished his father were still alive to explain it to him.

He traveled to Europe once more, to contact a friend in Belgium. It was a short trip, only two nights. He stopped in Paris on the way back and spent a day consulting for a French bank that had invested in a large agricultural project in the Sindh and was having difficulty repatriating its profits. He even gave a thought to visiting the American Embassy, off the Place de la Concorde, just to look into the eyes of the employees. But they might see him, too, and photograph him, and that would reopen a file somewhere. So he sat on a park bench off the Avenue Gabriel, a hundred yards from the embassy entrance, and watched the people come and go through the heavy metal door.